But it’s also a battle episode with spectacular explosions and crowded, noisy fight scenes. Game of Thrones’ “Blackwater,” for example, is far more compact than most chapters of the map-skipping fantasy epic, concentrating on a single night in the capital city of King’s Landing. In the prestige era, however, the bottle episode has expanded to accommodate stories that contain themselves only in a narrative sense, without sparing any expense-or episodes that fit the definition in letter, though arguably not in spirit. (For all the bottle episode’s network-friendly penny pinching, it took Larry David threatening to quit over the episode for NBC to agree to air it.) In “The One Where No One’s Ready,” the Friends never leave their dubiously spacious West Village abode, a setup so successful the producers recycled it several times over the show’s 10-season run. (Having appeared in both of these episodes of TV, 14 years apart, Carroll O’Connor is basically the godfather of the bottle episode.) In “The Chinese Restaurant,” Seinfeld’s gang of misanthropes wait in almost real time for a dinner table, wasting the half-hour in predictably petty ways. In “Two’s a Crowd,” Normal Lear’s seminal All in the Family boiled itself down to just cantankerous patriarch Archie Bunker and his liberal son-in-law Mike, locked in the storeroom of a bar and forced to talk out their differences. “Controlled Experiment” isn’t remembered as an all-time episode of television, but the technique it pioneered was soon applied to more enduring effect. “Controlled Experiment” took just four and a half shooting days and cost $100,000, a result Stevens likened to “pulling the episode right out of the bottle like a genie.” (In reality, Stevens banged out the script on a single cross-country flight, a similarly supernatural feat.) Stevens penned the episode “Controlled Experiment,” in which two Martians investigate a murder on Earth using a device that allows them to observe and replay past events. There’s not much to do with the same people and places as usual except have characters talk to each other in a room-and “people talking in rooms” is at once immensely difficult to get right and a description of some of the most riveting scenes ever filmed.īottle episodes were initially known as “bottle shows,” a term attributed to ’60s-era producer Leslie Stevens, then of the Twilight Zone–esque science-fiction anthology The Outer Limits. But like many developments in TV, the structural constraints of the bottle gave rise to artistic innovation. The reasons for the bottle episode’s existence are almost entirely practical with no guest-star fees or need to construct new sets, a bottle keeps costs to a minimum while still producing more content.
#BOTTLE EPISODE TV#
In its most classical sense, a bottle episode is a chapter of TV that uses only regular cast members and preexisting locations, though typically just one.
Zooming out: What is a bottle episode? The term is both a piece of jargon and a disputed one, making it doubly opaque to casual viewers. The history of the bottle episode, aptly enough, works as a history of television writ large. In half a century, the bottle episode has gone from a byproduct of TV’s shoestring production practices to a distilled example of its cultural resurgence.
#BOTTLE EPISODE SERIES#
What was once an unglamorous cost-saving measure is now an opportunity for series to flex their financial and creative muscles. Budgets, in extreme cases, can be comparable to those of feature films seasons, borrowing from the British model, can be as short as eight or even six episodes long stories are still hard, but showrunners are often given more resources and less pressure to execute their visions.Ĭonsequently, the nature of the bottle episode has changed. But over the years, television itself has changed. The form it describes, however, began as a fix to problems as old as television itself: finite budgets, lengthy episode orders, the need to generate new and inventive stories to fill said orders. Īccording to Merriam-Webster-you’re damn right I’m doing this-the term “bottle episode” has been in use only since around 2003. As we approach the 10th anniversary of Mad Men ’s “The Suitcase” on Saturday, join us in celebrating the highs and lows of one of television’s greatest exercises/flexes/budget-saving tricks: the bottle episode.
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